ales of teenage travails and memoirs: It's hard to think of more overdone trends in these waning '90s. Despite this baggage, Potential, the comic-book series in which Ariel Schrag recounts her junior year at Berkeley High School, puts a new spin on the teenage soap opera. Of course, her adventures wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell to make it to the Party of Felicity's Creek mainstream—in her world, heterosexuality is the alternative lifestyle. Schrag's girl-centered confessional style is closer in spirit to the early-'90s riot grrrls, and evenmore so to videaste Sadie Benning's autobiographical Pixelvision shorts, made when Benning was a budding teen dyke.

Schrag, now 19 and a student at Columbia University, began chronicling her life barely after entering high school, self-publishing her comics with the help of her supportive parents. Awkward and Definition covered Schrag's first two years of high school, capturing the glee of hanging out with pals and getting crushed out on No Doubt's singer Gwen Stefani. The six issues of Potential (to be collected by Slave Labor Graphics in January) document her junior year and include plenty of the teen vérité canon's obligatory scenes, like getting blitzed on booze and dealing with absentminded parents, but also move into less Hollywoodized territory: Over its span, it's slowly evolved into an epic, unflinching, sometimes brutal account of the life and loves of the not-so-average, smart, gay, and desperately horny Ariel.

One of the secrets of Potential's appeal is that it cannily combines the drive, raunch, and imagination of the best fiction with near-anthropological realness. Obsessively documenting her life as it went on, Schrag became a Margaret Mead of the post-punk set, carrying a tape recorder, even reproducing actual notes passed in class. This documentary feel is obviously linked to the cartoonist's age and closeness to her subject, but paradoxically it's also heightened by her deliberately cartoony drawing style. Reality is stylized with heavily inked characters featuring big heads and expressions that can become grotesquely distorted when in the throes of particularly intense emotions like despair or lust. Dreams and fantasies, on the other hand, are beautifully rendered in realistic, delicate washes.

Schrag may have polished her skills on technical drawings, for she is an unabashed science freak. From "the cascadent world of chemistry" to bio's "true massivity," she speaks of the sciences with the kind of words most of her peers use to describe the Backstreet Boys. But instead of isolating her, bio and chemistry help her bond with like-minded classmates and, more important, with older (she's a senior!) Sally Jults. Potential's real accomplishment may well be a rehabilitation of nerd sexuality—learning here is not only sexy in and of itself but also compatible with activities in which the brain takes the backseat. At one point, Ariel and Sally banter about their favorite subjects ("I'm going to marry the Human Anatomy teacher") while lustful thoughts of Sally and another student run through Ariel's head ("We got off the bus and walked down to school together. I felt so proud—me and the girl Meg Bunt ate out!"). Even teachers are humanized, sometimes cooler than the teens—a sympathetic art teacher turns out to be a dyke scenester who throws off Ariel and Sally with her discussion of dildos.

Schrag has no qualms spilling the beans about the most unforgiving details of her friends'—and her own—sex lives. This is all the more entertaining to readers beyond their teen years because she often makes familiarly stupid romantic choices. Early in the year, for instance, she develops a crush on 34-C Alexis, a ditz who carelessly chucks a gift from smitten Ariel while thanking her for it—Alexis's empty, Little Orphan Annie eyes instantly alert the reader to her cute-but-vacant personality. Been-there-done-that memories flood back and it's hard not to yell out, "No, not her! She's all wrong for you!" with all the empathic wisdom imparted by 20/20 hindsight. But what really makes Potential such a mesmerizing read is that as the story unfolds, these relatively well-traveled sentimental situations become almost tangential, and the book emerges as a nakedly honest exploration of desire and the whole range of emotions it can set off, from sexual excitement to frustration, from mortified embarrassment to uncontrollable joy.

Potential #1, or "The Cell" (each issue, or "unit," has a biology-inspired subtitle), opens with Ariel exclaiming, "Junior year and that means business." The business quickly turns out to involve dropping all pretense of bisexuality and plunging headfirst into girls, girls, girls. Schrag goes on to detail her sentimental education with hilarious frankness and a wickedly addictive sense of storytelling. As the year progresses, the series focuses on Ariel and Sally's courtship, bringing to life some of Potential's most touching pages as unexpected beauty and tenderness bloom in oddball situations. The pair engage in philosophical discussions about Ernie strips and have a date at the Little Farm because Sally likes goats. After that trip, Ariel daydreams at the dinner table. With her parents' overlapping, passive-aggressive bickering in the background, she's back at the farm, the herky-jerky lettering brilliantly evoking a surging flow of raging hormones. "I have kissed her once but now that she has spoken of goats I must do it again." And immediately afterward follows the awesome realization: "I WANT HER INSIDE ME."

Gradually the lighthearted high-school capers of the first couple of issues give way to heart-wrenching drama, as Sally, in a classic case of "I'm not a lesbian, I just like YOU" jitters, becomes increasingly distant. Ariel finally pops the question she had been trying to avoid: "Do you love me?" she asks Sally, who simply answers, "I don't think so." "Do you imagine hitting me," Sally continues. "Yes." A little later, Ariel puts her hands around Sally's neck. "Are you going to strangle me?" "No." "Good."

The only time Schrag pauses from the runaway train that is the Sally narrative is in "Unit Three: Mechanisms of Evolution," a stand-alone issue that's basically a quest book. Despite a steady girlfriend, Ariel becomes obsessed with losing her virginity to a boy as the last minutes of her 16th year tick by: "I will not be a 17 year old virgin," she mutters. The victim, er, accomplice will be Zally, a sweet boy she'd met a year earlier. Schrag turns the whole endeavor into a white-knuckled page-turner, relentlessly adding incriminating details (she starts her period on the fateful night; Zally gets performance anxiety) and even the Xerox of a used condom.

Potential concludes on a melancholic yet curiously hopeful note, as Ariel, rejected by Sally once again, sits alone in bed: "It really was just a matter of no obligations, so no expectations." Beat. "In other words, no more potential." Smile. And the end. Since the cartoonist is now working on Likewise, a graphic novel about her senior year, it's only a matter of months until her addicted readers finally learn how Ariel escaped from high school. In the meantime, Potential remains a vibrant testament to a year that was both lovely as a kiss and hard as a stone. It doesn't come as a surprise, then, when in one of their songs Le Tigre, a new band which includes Sadie Benning, name-checks Schrag along with the likes of Julie Doucet, Justin Bond, Shirley Muldowney, and Dorothy Allison. They probably had quite a time in high school too.

Elisabeth Vincentelli is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer.

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